SUMMARY: Does seeing your name in the nation’s third most popular news weekly sound exciting? Learn how to pitch U.S. News & World Report in our exclusive interview with their Deputy Business Editor. In it, James Bock explains what to include in your email to avoid his delete button.

BackgroundBock has been in the newspaper/magazine business for more than 30 years. He has held titles of reporter, editor and foreign correspondent.

Circulation and readershipU.S. News & World Report has a weekly readership of more than 11 million. For 2005, the magazine had 2,028,167 million paid subscriptions, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Men make up 57% of the magazine’s readers. The median age is 46.9 years old. 72% attended college, and 16% have post-graduate degrees. The median household income is $63,380. 30% of their readers hold professional/managerial positions while 14% are B-to-B decision makers.

They also offer two free newsletters: - This Week newsletter contains the best of print and online, including the weekly cover story, blogs, multimedia, special reports and annual guides.- Today newsletter brings headlines, multimedia and blogs published every weekday at USNews.com.Readers can customize their interest profiles, so the newsletters reflect the information they care about the most.

How to pitch The best way to get through to someone at U.S. News is by email. “Phone calls are disruptive,” Bock says. Reporters, columnists and editors are often on deadline, so they don’t always respond to queries. But, Bock promises, “if we’re interested, we’ll contact you.”

Uninformed queries don’t go very far. “Many pitches show that the PR person is not familiar with the kinds of stories we run,” he says. This means: stay away from sending useless boilerplate letters.

Bock looks for “an interesting trend, person, company or source.” He doesn’t answer all of the pitches he gets, though. Often, he will forward them to reporters whom he trusts to take over. “Sometimes I let them decide whether to follow up.”

Meet Bock and other editorsContact individual department heads if you would like to set up a lunch meeting. Bock doesn’t participate but suggested that you email the section editor who “does most of the lunching.”

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